Mad Fate

Soi Cheang’s frenzied follow-up to the stylish, ultra-violent crime drama Limbo, Mad Fate carries in its DNA the legacy of old-school Hong Kong genre stylists, from Ringo Lam to Johnnie To, who serves as producer on the film. Hitting the ground running with a fake burial ceremony, the film follows the misfortunes and entanglements of an eccentric fortune teller (simply called “The Master”) with a psychopathic, cat-killing delivery boy (Lokman Yeung), possessed with an irrepressible urge for homicide. The plot soon thickens and darkens as sharp tools are put to macabre use and the Master frantically tries to reprogram the young man’s predicted path (upon which he is meant to graduate from sadistic voyeurism to murder most foul) while struggling to maintain his own sanity. Set in a surreal city of hookers, mystics, and psychopaths, Mad Fate is a crazed, morally complex addition to classic Cantonese mean-streets noir.